Saturday quickie: shopping day with the kiddies

A few quick thoughts after spending the day shopping with my girls (a rare treat indeed).

- nothing emphasizes how badly our local mall sucks than going to an out of town mall. Really, our mall sucks.

- I hope that my girls remain as enthusiastic about bathing suit shopping as they are right now. I hope it never becomes an experience they dread, fraught with self-loathing and shame, like it does for so many women.

- What's a surefire way to dissuade me from spending money in an awesomely huge candy store the likes of which I've never seen? Tell me 10% of proceeds go towards sending missionaries to India. Colonialism makes the sweetest candy taste bitter.

- Pro-tip for customer service people. It's cool to tell someone their discount card is no longer valid, has expired or whatever. What's not cool is disbelieving it ever was valid and implying that the customer is either stupid or a liar. "I don't believe that ever happened," makes just such an implication. It's too bad, because I liked those pants and would have liked to buy them, except I don't spend money in places that insult me to my face, okay Addition-Elle?

Gah. It begins.

My eldest spawn will be 12 in a month. She operates under the delusion that the digits are reversed and she's actually 21. For her age, she is a pretty confident with her self-image and has a pretty experimental sense of style.

This sounds awesome, but as the parent who has to step in and remind her that she is still only 11, it can be fraught.

The teen years are approaching and I fear its arrival the way others have feared Y2K or the end of the Mayan calendar. And like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, various signs rear their head, signalling impending doom.

I took her and her stepsister (only a few months younger) shopping today. With their own money. When it's my money I usually have more control over clothing choices, usually by harness the power of being really, really cheap.

My kid has a predilection towards clothes that are not always age-appropriate. See aforementioned "12-going-on-21" thing. The challenge I find is explaining why something is inappropriate without resorting to shaming or telling her she's going to look like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.

In the period of less than an hour I found myself having to talk my not-yet-twelve year old out of:

- Neon pink short-shorts. This was easy enough to argue, since closer inspection revealed we were in the size 4-6x section. She's a 12. Easy Peasy

- 3-inch spike heels. Vetoed on the basis that heels are really, really bad for you. I have no doubt they fuck up the spine and legs of any grown woman. I don't even want to think of what those kind of heels would do to someone who is still growing.

- A yellow string bikini. Oof. I sputtered and stammered at that one and suggested trying some other styles. The other styles were all more expensive (probably due to the greater amount of fabric) and thus out of her limited price range. Finally, I appealed to her sense of broke-assedness and reminded her that I had already planned to take her and her sister bathing suit shopping next weekend. What kid wants to spend their own money on something mom was going to buy them anyway? She reluctantly put the suit back. Near miss on that one.

This is what I'm dealing with already and we haven't even hit high school yet. Gord help us all.

An open letter to the guy who insulted me as I went for breakfast.

Dear Asshole,

Today I got up and went for breakfast. The man friend was not up for it, so I decided to take a book for company instead. Seeing as it was a lovely, sunny, brisk morning I decided to walk to the restaurant. It seemed like it could shape up to be a decent day.

Thanks and a hearty "Fuck You" for ruining it.

As I was entering the front door of our local dining establishment, you and your probably equally douchey friend were coming out. I guess my appearance caught you eye because you felt compelled to exclaim "Wow! Holy fucking teeth!" at me.

For those who may not have seen pictures, I have prominent front teeth and a bit of an overbite. I know this, because assholes and dentists have insisted on pointing this out to me pretty much since my adult teeth came in. I'm 32 years old. It's nothing I haven't heard before. Doesn't mean it doesn't feel just as shitty now as it did when I was a kid.

So, thanks a lot for reducing me to feeling a goddamned awkward twelve-year-old and making me feel ugly and insecure once what you had said registered.

And then.. And THEN, you had the audacity to look outraged when, realizing that I had just been insulted to my fucking FACE, I turned around and told you to fuck off. Like I was the asshole here.

My apologies to any diners who were within earshot of that, by the way.

Believe me, that was the least you deserved for not keeping your bloody comments to yourself. A full-on public shaming would have been fitting so you could have felt as humiliated as I did at that moment, but unfortunately I'm not verbally eloquent when I'm upset. Hence why I blog.

So fuck you for making me feel like shit about myself when I was just minding my own business, enjoying my Saturday. Fuck you for the fact that I was just a little scared about walking home after breakfast, in case you and your friend decided I needed to be put in my place for speaking up. And fuck you for the good possibility that had the man friend been with me, you probably wouldn't have said shit because I'm pretty sure that's precisely the kind of cowardly piece of excrement you are.

I hope a large piece of frozen airplane toilet water crushes you from a great height.

And with that, my TV decided to channel Kurt Cobain.

I'm feeling rather grateful. It's been a stressed out week and a bit, but as the dust (and smoke and burning plastic smell - but more on that later) settles, I'm feeling immense gratitude.

I'm grateful that a week and a half after my sciatic episode, I'm pretty much pain-free. I've known people with sciatic injuries who have suffered for months and years on end. To be about 99% recuperated before I even had my first physio appointment, is pretty A-okay if you ask me.

I'm grateful that when my car started needing work, I had friends who were willing to step in and help with advice and work. I'm also grateful that when the need became especially urgent and said friends were unavailable due to circumstances beyond their control, financially I still had the option  of going to a shop and get the work done, armed with the advice given me.

I'm especially grateful that my pain-in-my-broken-ass kept The Well Travelled One and I home last Thursday night when my 6 year old Electrohome CRT television decided to literally go out in a blaze of glory. Let's be clear, when I say it was 6-years-old I refer only to the timeline in which I bought it. I wouldn't be surprised if they stopped manufacturing them much sooner. Its time was due. So as I sat there watching season 4 of Newsradio, Phil Hartman's head got really skinny, then kind of fat, then a little of both. I wondered if it was the connector and the WTO, who had a side view of the set from the vantage point of the computer desk calmly stated "actually, no, it's a small fire" before jumping over to quickly unplug it from the wall and disconnect all the peripherals.

So I am grateful that we had turned down the chance to go to karaoke, otherwise the girls would have been home, probably watching My Little Pony, wondering why Rainbow Dash's face was distorting when the set went up in flames. Thank Gord for oddly timed coincidences. Putting aside the most obvious, horrific possible outcome of that scenario.. Well, one traumatic house-fire is enough for any kid. But since my broken ass kept us home, the fire remained contained to the back of the casing, the only evidence a lingering smell of scorched plastic.

Better to burn out than fade away indeed. Tell that to all my other electronics that simply stopped working and didn't feel the need to get all showboat-y about it.